How Haven staffs 41 parks ahead of every season

The challenge

Haven is one of Britain’s leading family holiday companies, part of the Bourne Leisure Group, with 41 award-winning parks across England, Scotland and Wales. Coming out of the spring 2021 lockdown, the business faced an unstable industry, heightened staff turnover and several hundred roles to fill, with every park needing to run at full capacity for the season ahead.

Haven wanted three things solved: parks in hard-to-staff locations filled ahead of peak; clear visibility of how recruitment campaigns performed and how candidates moved through the application, so both could keep improving; and a stronger employer brand online, so more of the workforce knew the jobs existed.

“Finding quality candidates in certain locations was nigh-on impossible,” said Nola Ferguson, Head of Talent Acquisition. The existing channels were delivering neither the quality nor the volume Haven needed.

What we built

inploi took on Haven’s recruitment marketing as job distribution tuned park by park and role by role, alongside search optimisation so vacancies were found through organic channels as well as paid ones. The careers site was rebuilt and kept current, lifting Haven’s employer brand online, with a mobile-first application that stays easy for every applicant.

Analytics and attribution gave Haven one view of how candidates move across every channel, so campaigns and the candidate experience on the careers site could be adjusted continuously on evidence rather than instinct. The next step, agreed with Haven, was to connect tracking from first touch to hire so that spend could be optimised against hires, not just applications.

What happened

Cost per application fell year on year while application volume rose considerably, and the pool of candidates Haven needed was in place well ahead of schedule. Haven’s published figures for 2023 against 2022 are set out below, as published.

2023: the year the headcount goal landed in August

By 2023 the question was no longer whether the parks could open but whether Haven could hit its annual headcount goal to schedule. Job distribution ran throughout the year across Facebook, Instagram, Indeed, job boards and aggregators, focused on four verticals: cleaners, lifeguards, chefs and brand roles. Targeting followed the number of vacancies in each region and how urgently they needed filling, and budget was concentrated on the roles struggling most for applications. Chefs were the persistent problem area, so a share of the budget went to chef campaigns all year.

Social campaigns ran in three phases, each with fresh creative. Messaging about role benefits and flexibility drew the highest click-through, so variations of it ran in every phase. The first two phases promoted business-as-usual roles on Indeed and aggregators while social built awareness ahead of summer; the final phase, launched in early June, was the multi-channel Summer Jobs campaign that filled the top of the funnel for every key location. Bids were adjusted daily on inploi’s own data and on feedback from the publishers, with inploi working as an extension of Haven’s team to set priorities and adjust the approach.

Haven hit its annual headcount goal by August. The figures the 2023 case study printed are shown below, as published.

In their words

It felt like a race against the clock. The hospitality industry was finally starting to reopen, filling our open roles quickly and efficiently was our top priority. And we found our solution with inploi.

inploi has been an incredible value-add for us, consistently enhancing our recruitment approach. We’ve really enjoyed working alongside inploi to deliver on our recruitment objectives.

Nola Ferguson, Head of Talent Acquisition, Haven